I bet you thought you would never have to watch another terrible movie script from the 80s, depicting outcasts and geek nerdlings battling it out with rough and tumble jocks, the socially elite, and spoiled yuppies. Yet here we are reenacting with real life characters with the likes of Craigslist, Google, Wikipedia and Reddit playing the nerds and Nike, Sony, News Corp, VISA, and the Recording Industry and Motion Picture Associations of America playing the cool kids. Everyone should know what SOPA and PIPA are by now. Especially after today’s “blackout” with quite a few large sites changing their front page to SOPA information or blacking out their logos with a censor block. But, just in case you don’t, here’s the 2 second rundown.
Texas Republican Lamar Smith along with a bi-partisan group of co-sponsors introduced a bill to help curb piracy. But the bill proposed a battle ax approach of dissecting the problem when a fine laser is needed. It granted the ability to not only shut down a site, but utterly destroy it, with no legal process. If a website was accused of hosting illegally obtained material, that site could face being removed from search engines, accounts frozen by payment transaction companies, all advertisers removed and all traffic halted by their internet service provider. While the scope of that original bill is ridiculous, what’s even more absurd are some of the claims companies are making about pirated materials. Monster Cable has released a list of sites that they claim are “rogue sites” and would be threatened if these bills are passed. Besides listing every website on the internet, it also includes two notorious crime syndicates, Costco and Sears.
The real question that arises amid these starter bills is this. Where does it go from here? If these bills pass, even in a stripped down altered state, it’s still planting a seed of censorship that could turn into a thorny ugly bush. We generally think of SOPA as something that only affects digital media such as movies or music, but that scope can easily change. Can it go after blog sites for rewriting content? Can it shut down your personal page cause it has a picture of your friend that was uploaded to a hosting company that now owns the copyright? (Yes, uploading pictures gives them shared copyright). Can it go after your grandmother for emailing you that cute panda bear video she saw on TV? Can it shut down your favorite shopping sites because they sell a flip flop that looks like a Nike flip flop.
Back to our heart stopping movie script. The difference between today’s nerds and those of yesteryear are stark. Not only are they now billionaires, but they also have a huge support base and are tied into almost every aspect of American social culture. The anti-SOPA movement has already made 3 of the 13 co-sponsors back out, including Senator Marco Rubio who made this Facebook statement. Representatives Lee Terry and Ben Quayle also pulled their support of the bill and many other congressmen have expressed concerns, which leaves the bill in a strange desperate state. The House of Representatives has delayed the vote for a month, but anything can happen. Let’s hope those nerds can get their revenge (is that copyrighted?).
